Long before the conjured cinematic world of fictional narratives emerged, there were groundbreaking filmmakers objectively capturing the true wonders of the real world. It has been over 100 years since the documentary genre was born, a period that has seen the emergence of such masters as Dziga Vertoz (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929); Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of The Will, 1935); D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, 1967); Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies, 1967); Albert and David Maysles (Salesman, 1969; Gimme Shelter, 1970; Grey Gardens, 1975);Chris Marker (Sans soleil, 1983); Claude Lanzmann (Shoah, 1985); and, Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, 1989; The Fog of War, 2003). But what does the term ‘documentary’ mean to the modern practitioners of the factual film? SCREEN-SPACE asked eight of the filmmakers screening their latest at the 2017 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival to finish the sentence, “Documentary is…”

DOCUMENTARY IS.…“a format to shine a light, investigate the truth, record history and celebrate amazing people and places while entertaining with style. #MakeADifference”C. FITZ, Dir: JEWEL CATCH ONE (pictured, above; C. Fitz, left, with Jewel Thais Williams. Photo: Michael Owen Baker, LA Times)From the MDFF program: With 4 strikes against her (black, female, poor and a lesbian), our trailblazer, Jewel Thais-Williams, helped changed laws, save lives and influence communities across Los Angeles, California as she opened her legendary nightclub's door for 42 years.

DOCUMENTARY IS.… “a passion of mine. I love the stories, the real stories. The challenge to make a film in this genre has been one I’d aspired to for many years. I took another passion of mine, music, and decided I wanted to give it a shot. I honestly had an epiphany to make this film. I wanted to make this film.”PATRICK BUCHANAN, Dir: LUNAR ORBITFrom the MDFF program: Lunar Orbit takes us deep into the Ultraworld of the pioneers of ambient house music. We explore The Orb's unique creative process with unprecedented studio access and delve into the story behind the music.

DOCUMENTARY IS…. “imagining how situations will unfold then aligning yourself to capture the action.”MAT DE KONING, Dir: MEAL TICKETS (pictured, right: Koning, left, during production in 2010).From the MDFF program: The lives of high school band mates and their roadie who dedicate their twenties to seeking success in the music industry. From Perth to New York, Melbourne to Los Angeles we are given a back stage pass to the gigs, the tour, the conflicts and indulgences.

DOCUMENTARY IS.… “taking action. And by action I don't necessarily mean, being an activist. At some post-film discussions people call me an activist and I am quick to correct them. I consider myself more of an engaged citizen. Activist, to me, often means someone so angry (often rightly so) about an issue that I can't really have a conversation with them. So for me, documentary is taking action--but that action can be as simple as listening, asking good questions, asking dumb questions, moving in a direction to better understand something.” THOMAS BENA, Dir: ONE BIG HOMEFrom the MDFF program: On the tiny island of Martha’s Vineyard, where presidents and celebrities vacation, trophy homes threaten to destroy the islands unique character. Twelve years in the making, One Big Home follows one carpenters journey to understand the trend toward giant houses. When he feels complicit in wrecking the place he calls home, he takes off his tool belt and picks up a camera.

DOCUMENTARY IS…. “storytelling that can have a social impact. It can humanise an issue so people can connect, be moved and take action.”BELINDA MASON, Dir: CONSTANCE ON THE EDGEFrom the MDFF program: One family. Two wars. Three countries. What does it take to forge a new life far from home? Filmed over 10 years, Constance on The Edge is an unflinchingly honest portrayal of one refugee family’s resettlement story in Australia.

DOCUMENTARY IS.... “an art form that gives people a voice and a chance to tell their personal truth.” STEPHANIE CLATTENBERG (pictured, right), Dir: PLAY YOUR GENDERFrom the MDFF program: Juno Award-winning musician Kinnie Starr is on a quest to find out why only 5% of music producers are women even though many of the most bankable pop stars are female. What does it take for a woman to make it in music?

DOCUMENTARY IS.… ”the nexus between art and social engagement in non-fiction story-telling. In recent years documentary has been re-branded by television as ‘Specialist Factual’, ‘Factual Entertainment’, ‘Docu-soap’ and ‘Reality Television’. Ratings are now the major driver for public broadcasters since the Howard government made ratings a prerequisite for government funding. And to increase ratings, the non-fiction TV doc has been restructured to make it ‘more accessible’ and easy to follow. So this is has become what most people now think of as ‘documentary’. But the great documentaries, the ones that have lasted and will continue to last, are more complex. They require real engagement from the audience. They are based on ideas and composed of open-ended explorations. And rather than relying on presenters and narrators, they explore different ways of telling a story - the language of the film.”NICK TORRENS (pictured, left), Dir: CHINA’S 3DREAMSFrom the MDFF program: China’s 3Dreams takes us deep inside the dilemmas and dreams of China’s people – without mediation from Western presenters and narrators. Featuring rare archive and extraordinary testimony from former Red Guards and Rebels, here is a powerful parable of China in the 21st century.

DOCUMENTARY IS.... “a real story that matters today and in time becomes a record of who we were collectively.”CLAIRE STONE, Dir: SEVEN WOMEN IN NEPAL THE BIRTH OF A SOCIAL ENTERPRISEFrom the MDFF program: Seven Women in Nepal examines how one Australian created a successful social enterprise with the disabled women of Nepal and what is possible with a willingness to learn from mistakes and the right people to help.

The 2017 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival runs July 9-16. Session and ticketing information can be found at the events official website.

Set in Nazareth, Holy Air is the story of a Palestinian named Adam, striving against the socio-political barriers he faces everyday, to achieve his full potential and a meaningful happiness. His entrepreneurial vision inspires him to bottle and sell ‘holy air’, small jars of the very atmosphere found at the most spiritual of places, Mount Precipice. Writer/director Shady Srour, who also stars as the forlorn but determined protagonist, has crafted both a wonderfully funny satire that tackles faith, oppression and gender roles, and a deeply etched portrait of a man at an existential crossroad. Ahead of the long haul flight that will bring him to the Australian premiere of Holy Air at the Sydney Film Festival, Shady spoke to SCREEN-SPACE from his home in Israel… (SPOILER ALERT)

Photo credit: Sofyan Zhalka

SCREEN-SPACE: The very notion of 'holy air' is so wonderfully absurd yet entirely believable in this age of fanatic beliefs and blind faith. When did the concept of 'bottled holy spirit, weighing one gram' first come to you?

SROUR: When I started to write the script, I wanted to create a trinity – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - so I modeled it along three lines. The ‘Father’ is the story line with the father; the ‘Son’ is the story with the wife and fetus, which is also connected to the annunciation; and, the ‘Holy Spirit’, which is the selling of spirituality as a commodity, like the toilet paper scene. And, of course, in writing and developing the script over eleven years, all the other ideas started to be built within this frame.

SCREEN-SPACE: Your hero, Adam, is so disconnected from all that surrounds him. The traffic jam opening suggests his life is in motion, but not really moving at all. There is universality about how lost he truly is; that moment many men feel as youth fades and adult responsibility beckons...

SROUR: Nazareth is one of the most densely populated Arabian cities in Israel, with no space to expand. It’s part of an occupation plan to suffocate the Arabs inside their villages, places that look like refugees camps. So the traffic is part of our reality. The traffic jam is a motif, a symbol to say that our life here is stuck, its not moving anywhere, not politically or socially or religiously. It’s going to hell. And when Adam, who is smart and ambitious, can't fulfill his dreams and his goals because of unfair situations - because he is Arab, Palestinian - he is like everybody else, very tired and exhausted. His disconnection from his surroundings is like a self-defense mechanism, so he won't go crazy. That’s part of the character's development; starting from that disconnection from reality, he gets the annunciation that he is having a baby, so his fatherhood seeds begin to grow. He has to be rational in this crazy land, face a more rational reality. This is the tragedy; he has nothing to do but accept the reality of fatherhood. (Pictured, above; Srour, second from left, as Adam in Holy Air)

SCREEN-SPACE: Your script finds shading in the relationship between the various ethnicities and religions of Nazareth. Was making all these characters as 'human' as possible part of your plan?

SROUR: To be honest, I think I have so much anger here regarding Israel\Palestine. Every side – Judaism, Islam and Christianity - is getting more fanatical; that’s why no one is safe from my satire. I tried to make it in a smart way, because here every one is so sensitive about anything to do with religion. It’s dangerous to my life; I was boycotted and threatened for different projects in the past and I'm expecting tension for Holy Air as well. When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he went against the Pope but he wrote it in a smart way so the church wouldn't get rid of him. And, as you mentioned, the warm moments were intentional, because my main target was to bring the human being to the front and push back the political aspect. I wanted to challenge the audience to look at my main characters as human being and not through the stereotypical Israeli-Palestinian conflict they know from the news. (Pictured, above; Shady Srour as Adam)

SCREEN-SPACE: There is something slightly askew about the film's reality. Adam keeps disappearing into the bath, at one point for a long time as his wife talks about their baby-future. It can be theorised that your film exists in a dream-like state?

SROUR: Since the whole idea of Holy Air is trippy, I was trying to play with the reality, or what’s called magic-realism. You can ask yourself is it for real or not, and I wanted to give the film a hallucinatory aspect. That’s why Adam gets into the bathtub at the beginning and at the end there is a shot of the bathtub empty; does Adam stay in the bathtub from the beginning till the end and all of what happened to him is only in his head? In scenes where Adam smokes weed, and drinks whisky, I was playing within a thin line between reality and not reality. By the way, rarely has the audience taken it this way but I wanted them to instinctively feel it.

SCREEN-SPACE: As ‘Lamia’, Laëtitia Eïdo has a wonderful chemistry with you. As issues such as politics, history, religion and patriarchy unfold, what did her character ‘Lamia’ convey about gender in modern Nazareth?

SROUR: In general, the stereotypical Arab women in Nazareth are the women wearing hijab, but the modern Arab woman doesn't get much representation in cinema. So imagine in a conservative society such as the Arab society there are also Palestinian women like Lamia. Politically speaking, the society expects Palestinian women to sacrifice and be strong, filled with pride so she doesn't collapse. I wanted to convey that it’s legitimate to show her weakness sometimes, as it is something that makes her even stronger. (Pictured, above; Srour with co-star Laëtitia Eïdo)

SROUR: Oedipus by Sophocles, Macbeth by Shakespeare, The Wild Duck by Ibsen, Tartuffe by Molliere, Divine Comedy by Dante and the Bible, are mostly my inspiration. I came from a theatre background; I did my B.A in Theatre Acting, and my M.F.A in Cinema, and I'm a university lecturer in theatre analysis. I believe in the continuation of theatre, so my inspiration comes from theatre. My big inspiration was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, so this film has the existentialist conflicts, circular principle and forced pairings between all the characters of a tragi-comedy. ‘Lamia’ was inspired by Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, while Adam was designed as a ‘Hero’, employing elements from old Greek theater. For instance, he has kind of supernatural powers, that’s why he speaks five languages. Like a ‘hero’, he focuses on a target and he goes for it until the end. There is also the conflict between Rationalism and Idealism. Adam is spacey but uses the corrupted system in a rational way, while Lamia is a feminist, a humanist so idealistic that she wants an abortion. Hers is a destructive idealism. And of course, this is a story happening in Nazareth, so there are some references from the bible; it’s a kind of a new annunciation after 2000 years. When Jesus said he was the Son of God and was kicked out of Nazareth, he fled to Mount Precipice. So for Adam, it's a place where he can get fresh air and be a little spiritual, away from his negative city. My inspiration for the story has many layers that don’t have to reach an audience with this clarity of vision, but I was trying to have it in the background so that the audience had a sense of it.

HOLY AIR screens June 17 and 18 at the Sydney Film Festival. Session and ticket information can be found at the event’s official website.

One of the great journeyman cinematographers of the last half-century, Fred J. Koenekamp passed away on May 31, aged 94. At a time when Hollywood was opening its doors to continental artists like Vittorio Storaro, Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, Koenekamp was a local craftsman who graduated from television (Gunsmoke; The Lieutenant; The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Mission Impossible) to become a master of bigscreen spectacle.

Debuting as an assistant on the Jane Russell vehicle Underwater! (1955), Koenekamp would work the studio roster, shooting such films as the Sandra Dee/George Hamlton romp Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding? (1967), Elvis Presley’s trippy Live a Little Love a Little (1968) and the western comedy The Great Bank Robbery (1969). When 20th Century Fox asked him to meet with director Franklin J Schaffer and discuss a project that would become an American cinema classic, a career of high-profile projects was set in motion…

PATTON“Frank asked me how I worked on a set. ‘Do you like multiple cameras?’ ‘Yes, I’ve always liked multiple cameras, and I like a handheld camera on the set all the time. You never know when you’ll need it.’ We probably talked for an hour, and it seemed to go very smoothly. About a week later I got a call, and they said they wanted me for Patton.” – Interview, American Cinematographer, February 2005

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLSKoenekamp signed on for his first film after Patton, convinced (as was much of the industry, including 20th Century Fox) that bad boy Russ Meyer’s sinful and sordid shocker would be the new decade’s cause celebre. The DOP clashed badly with the director, who was used to lensing his own low-budgeters; Koenekamp found himself framing X-rated scenes that were unlikely to make the final edit. He ultimately dodged many of the bullets critics aimed at the notorious film, and reaffirmed his post-Patton/pre-Dolls buzz with films such as Billy Jack (1971), Skin Game (1971) and the Raquel Welch hit, Kansas City Bomber (1972).

PAPILLON"To this day, I still think Papillon is one of the best pictures I shot. I think it had a good look, the actors were terrific. There were no battling egos on the set, which I thought might have happened, but it didn't. They would talk to each other, off to the side, then come and talk to the director. I think Dustin made Steve work harder and, I think, that made Steve do one of the best jobs he has ever done." - Cinema Misfits, October 2011.

THE TOWERING INFERNO“I got a call saying Irwin Allen wanted to talk to me at Fox. Oddly enough, I’ve been a fire truck buff all my life. I don’t know why, I just love them. I talked to Irwin, and he said he wanted me to do Towering Inferno. They already had Joe Biroc on it, and Irwin said, ‘Joe’s going to do the second unit with you, but you’ll do the first unit with director John Guillermin.’- Interview, American Cinematographer, February 2005. Koenekamp shared the Academy Award for Cinematography with Biroc, and would go on to work with Irwin Allen on the Swarm (1978) and When Time Ran Out… (1980)

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSIONKoenekamp kept working thoughout the1980s, although the projects he aligned with found all manner of notoriety. He shot a clearly unwell Steve McQueen in his final film, Buzz Kulik’s The Hunter (1980); Buck Henry’s little-seen satire First Family (1980), with Bob Newhart; the racially-themed comedy Carbon Copy, featuring a young Denzel Washington; and, Ronald Neames’ First Monday in October. He helmed two critically mauled star vehicles – the reteaming of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, Two of a Kind, for John Herzfeld; and, once again for Schaffer, the Luciano Pavarotti showpiece, Yes Giorgio. Cult film devotees will always hold Koenekamp in high regard for his work on W.D. Richter’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a project that allowed him a rare opportunity to experiment in the early days of genre film special effects technology.

FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDERHis final work would be John Milius’ gung-ho military actioner, Flight of The Intruder, in 1991, retiring at the age of 67. “When I walked off the set that last night, it was a real sad night. My wife was out of town, and I went home and sat there and had a drink. I thought, ‘Is it really over?’ For six or eight months after I retired, I’d get calls every once in awhile, and finally everyone realized I wasn’t working anymore. I didn’t miss a lot of things, but what I did miss, and still miss, is the camaraderie of the crew.” - Interview, American Cinematographer, 2005. (Pictured, right; Milius and crew farewell the DOP on his final shooting day. Photo copyright: American Cinematographer, 2005)

2017 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: From the moment Nick Broomfield arrived in the US, the British documentarian has dug deep into the darkest recesses of American society. From the juvenile detention system (Tattooed Tears, 1979), to the mind of a psychopath (Aileen Wournos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, 1992), Broomfield has sought truths with a fearless, occasionally reckless, sometimes controversial eye for factual film. Some of his most acclaimed works have been dissections of doomed celebrities, including Monster in a Box (1992), featuring the late Spalding Gray; Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995); Kurt & Courtney (1998); Biggie and Tupac (2002); and, Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (2011).

His latest is Whitney: Can I Be Me, a heartbreaking work that charts the meteoric rise and addiction fuelled decline of America’s Pop Princess, the late Whitney Houston. The film is a combination of fresh interview footage and archival content, the most remarkable being concert and backstage footage shot in 1999 by the great Rudi Dolezal. From his car, sitting immobile in the daily traffic gridlock of one of Los Angeles busiest motorways, Nick Broomfield spoke with SCREEN-SPACE about his unauthorised exposé of one of pop culture’s sweetest, saddest talents…

SCREEN-SPACE: Was a Whitney Houston project in your plans, or did Rudi’s footage give it impetus, a fresh focus?

BROOMFIELD: Rudi’s footage certainly gave it more focus and impetus, but I was working for a year without his footage. I’d done my interviews and got all the music together and was thinking about my edit when I met with Rudi this time last year and we decided to amalgamate our forces. I did not know going in I would have his footage but I was completely delighted when I saw it. It was unique and intimate and never been seen before. I have a profound respect for what Rudi managed to do. It was the luck of the Gods that it all worked out this way. (Pictured, right; Whitney I Can Be Me co-director, Rudi Dolezal)

SCREEN-SPACE: The chasm between her soaring talent and beauty and the depths of her addictions and mental health issues is heartbreaking. How do you perceive of her rise and fall?

BROOMFIELD: She was an incredibly sweet kid, who was funny, funny, funny growing up on the streets of Newark. She was someone who wanted everyone around her to be happy, so went along with the flow to a big extent. In that regard, she was malleable, which I think is what Clive Davis had been looking. She had talent but, unlike Aretha Franklin or Dionne Warwick, was very new to her career and talent. She was the perfect vehicle for Clive’s vision. But she paid an enormous price for that because, like most creations, they fall apart, when they want to be themselves. They don’t want to be something they know they are not.

SCREEN-SPACE: Having been devoutly involved with her neigbourhood, the backlash from the black community clearly left scars…

BROOMFIELD: It was increasingly hard for her to be ‘Whitney Houston’, particularly with the whole racial thing in the United States, which was so powerful. It was very hard for her to not be accepted by her own people, by the black community, who thought she was sell-out. They called her ‘Oreo Cookie’ or ‘Whitey Houston’, and that was pretty devastating for her. She couldn’t understand where that was coming from. I’m sure Bobby Brown had much more influence than he would have done if these things hadn’t happened. As soon as she stopped being the ‘angel’, the American Sweetheart, which took awhile to happen, and she became the target of ridicule on the late night talk shows…well, I think she was very thin-skinned and that response drove her deeper into her addictions. It was a sad downward spiral. (Pictured, above; Whitney Houston)

SCREEN-SPACE: It is fascinating to view her in hindsight, of her place in 80s pop culture. There was Madonna’s rawness, Michael Jackson’s ‘King of Pop’ status, Springsteen’s working class man persona. Whitney was the 'Princess', an innocent who just wanted to dance with somebody. In the end, it was all that was shitty about the 80s – drugs, corporatisation, race issues – that claimed her…

BROOMFIELD: That's very true. It was decade where all the black artists wanted to make the crossover to this big white audience, and I think the degree of sacrifice they had to make to achieve that was enormous. Not only in what they sang, but how they had to portray themselves. It was very much about forgetting or ignoring where they came from (to become) something that was acceptable in this country. In the same way that O.J. Simpson kind of ended up in a no man’s land that cast him as neither black nor white, Whitney went through not dissimilar things for a long time. When she decided to get back to her roots, she did it with a vengeance, with real defiance.

SCREEN-SPACE: Your film is typically insightful and thorough, but there’s a softer edge to how you approach her story as opposed to your portraits of Kurt Cobain or Tupac or Heidi Fleiss. Did the nature of her story demand that or are you getting melancholy in your old age?

BROOMFIELD: (Laughs) Well, it might be both. I think the film I did before this one, Tales of The Grim Sleeper, was also tender and more loving so, yes, maybe that’s true. Maybe there is more heart in it (pause). You know, I was definitely moved, unexpectedly moved by Whitney’s story. The editor and I would often have tears welling up as we cut it, and we’d both seen it I don’t know how many eyes. It is a very moving, very tragic story.

SCREEN-SPACE: Looking back at your portrait films, those that have featured the likes of Spalding Gray, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, and now Whitney Houston, can you see a through a line in these character types that your films address?

BROOMFIELD: People who give what all those artists give in a performance, who feel things so deeply, who are that charismatic…well, it’s very hard for them to fly so close to the sun and not get burnt. They so celebrate life, are so life affirming, that when we are in their presence you feel alive. Because they are so alive, they make incredible film subjects; they have that elixir. We are excited by the shiniest star and all those people have that, don’t they? Also, they are the icons of our time in history, of the culture we are part of. Portraits of people who have significance to our time and place are fascinating and speak volumes.

WHITNEY: I CAN BE ME screens June 7 and 9 at the Sydney Film Festival before a nationwide release on June 15 via Rialto Distribution. Festival session and ticket details can be found at the event’s official website.

2017 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: The melancholy and deeply affecting tale of a middle-aged Thai man, an elephant and a pilgrimage to reconnect with childhood memories, Pop Aye has been the darling of the 2017 festival circuit. After a long gestation period in the script lab environment, the debut film from Singapore auteur Kirsten Tan has both wowed critics (earning the World Cinema Screenwriting Jury Prize at Sundance) and been adored by patrons (scoring the Big Screen audience-voted trophy at Rotterdam). “The notion of time passing, wherever you may go, is pretty universal,” says Tan, who spoke to SCREEN-SPACE from her New York home ahead of her film’s screenings at the 2017 Sydney Film Festival…

SCREEN-SPACE: How did the project’s passage through the ‘Festival Lab’ process – the Berlinale Talents initiative, the Torino Film Lab, Cannes Atelier, then Sundance – influence and impact the story you wanted to tell?

TAN: The script changed a lot from the very first draft. The entire process took about two and a half years, during which we lost several characters. With the help of all these mentors and the ‘lab process’, the themes emerged. It was slow, chipping-away to clarify what I really wanted to say. And just before Torino, I went to Thailand for about three weeks, just to live with and research elephants, to study their movements and personalities so that I could write an elephant character with authenticity. I needed the elephant character to be as real as my human ones.

SCREEN-SPACE: Was the script locked down by the time you arrived in Thailand?

TAN: Once we got to Thailand for the shoot, it took about four months of preparation. I kept adjusting the script to make aspects more real; certain songs that I wanted, for example, were taken out because I learned that they were not appropriate. So many aspects of the script changed right up until we started filming, and then it evolved further as actors began improvising, which I wanted to incorporate as much as I could. (Pictured, right; Thaneth Warakulnukroh and 'Bong', in Pop Aye)

SCREEN-SPACE: Your cast of characters present such a rich cross-section of humankind…

TAN: I tried to paint a realistic story, which for me is one filled with pathos and humour, with beauty and brutality. I didn’t want to present a one-sided story, but rather one that offers a full spectrum of life experience.

SCREEN-SPACE: The casting of Thaneth Warakulnukroh in the leading role ensures a warm empathy is at the heart of your story. His performance is a subtle, sweet everyman figure…

TAN: In his younger days, he was this really edgy Thai rock star. It was insane; in his old photos, he literally looks like Mick Jagger (laughs). At the height of his fame, he just quit the music scene and disappeared. All these years later, I’m searching for a lead actor and my friend recommends him to me. Now he looks so gentle, so reserved. That juxtaposition of who he was and who he is intrigued me. I could see he was someone who had experienced the extreme highs and extreme lows of life. When I got him to audition before the camera, he proved a natural. Then he put on 10 kilos for the part, he was that committed. (Pictured, above; Thaneth Warakulnukroh and 'Bong', in Pop Aye)

SCREEN-SPACE: Does a location shoot in a place like Thailand influence the creative process?

TAN: We shot in what would become the hottest Thailand weather in four decades. Now, I don’t know if you’ve been to Thailand, but it’s already pretty hot (laughs). But that heat added something to the journey; if you see Thaneth in pain or discomfort, he’s probably not acting. The climate pushed us all to extremes, which must have influenced what we created. We actually charted his path from Bangkok to Loei, to study the kind of landscape and terrain he would pass. Then we shot around Loei, matching locations with what we had seen on our own journey. Most of the shoot took place only an hour or two away from the city centre.

SCREEN-SPACE: One of the film’s greatest assets is its refusal to anthropomorphise the elephant, to play for any kind of cuteness in it’s portrayal…

TAN: In their presence, you can’t not respect these animals. I just tried to bring some truthfulness to the depiction of Pop Aye. I didn’t want to milk the cuteness or the exotic aspects; I didn’t want to mould them into what I, or an audience, might want them to be. I just wanted to show him as he really is, because that is what is most beautiful about him. (Pictured, right; Tan, centre, with crew on location during the filming of Pop Aye)

SCREEN-SPACE: As Pop Aye, your elephant Bong pulls off one of the most evocative close-ups in recent memory…

TAN: We shot that using a crane, to give us the slightest elevation, and there was some slight movement on his part that captures such emotion. Actually, just out of frame, we were filling his mouth with bananas just to keep his head still (laughs). We were finally able to cut the sequence so that, yes, it is imbued with a great deal of meaning.

SCREEN-SPACE: Why is this little Thai film playing so well internationally? What about it is so appealing to audiences from Rotterdam to Sundance to Sydney?

TAN: It was important that the film spoke to a larger humanity. To me, the film is about time and its inevitable passing. This notion of inevitability, of the passage of time, is really universal. As is the bleak humour in one’s existence, which I tried to capture. I was born in Asia but have spent most of adult life in America, in New York, and I do see people on both continents employ humour to cope with life’s tragedies.

POP AYE screens June 16, 17 and 18 at the Sydney Film Festival. Full session and ticket information can be found at the event’s official website.